News
-
The Vatican denied covering up for a former papal ambassador accused of sexually abusing boys and suggested he might have to stand trial on the charges in the Dominican Republic.
Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, released a statement Aug. 25 in response to journalists' questions about former Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, a Pole who served as nuncio to the Dominican Republic until August 2013.
-
Hunger and panic are spreading among people unable to work because of restrictions aimed at containing the spread of Ebola in Liberia and Sierra Leone, say church workers in West Africa.
In Liberia's capital, Monrovia, church groups "are trying to get food and distribute it to families who have asked us to help, but movement is heavily restricted and there is little we can do," Salesian Father Jorge Crisafulli, provincial superior in West Africa, said in an Aug. 22 telephone interview...
-
Although Christians, Muslims and Jews have struggled for hundreds of years to live peacefully alongside each other in the Middle East, "we have never seen the kind of 'religious cleansing' we are witnessing today," said the head of the region's Franciscans.
"All religious communities must raise their voices against this abomination" being carried out, particularly in Iraq and Syria, by terrorists calling themselves the Islamic State, said Franciscan Father Pierbattista Pizzaballa,...
-
As Ukrainians prepared to mark their Aug. 24 Independence Day under the cloud of fierce fighting in the East, Catholic leaders condemned the threat to Ukraine's territorial integrity and prayed for a speedy end to the hostilities.
At the same time, Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, major archbishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, issued a rebuttal to Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill of Moscow's claims that that the Ukrainian Catholic Church and its priests were fomenting hatred and...
-
In new actions related to the federal contraceptive mandate, the Obama administration has announced rules allowing religious nonprofits and some companies to opt out of coverage they oppose on moral grounds, and the Diocese of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, has won a permanent injunction against enforcement of the mandate.
Greensburg Bishop Lawrence E. Brandt praised the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania for its ruling recognizing the "basic religious freedom" of...
-
When the Peace Corps announced in late July that it was evacuating its 340 volunteers from the three West African countries most affected by the Ebola virus, the action was far from a panic-driven decision, but instead followed a protocol.
A similar protocol for health and security risks has led Catholic Relief Services to keep its personnel in the same countries—Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea—while following enhanced sanitary procedures and restricting most travel.
-
With the strife and violence continuing in the aftermath of Michael Brown's shooting death by a police officer in Ferguson, more than 500 St. Louis Catholics gathered for a votive Mass for peace and justice Aug. 20 at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis.
Brown, 18, was black, and Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot him Aug. 9, is white.
St. Louis Archbishop Robert J. Carlson celebrated the Mass with 27 priests and, in his homily, laid out five important steps to "...
-
Human trafficking destroys the lives of millions of children, women and men each year, making it a real threat to peace, the Vatican said as it announced Pope Francis' 2015 World Peace Day message would focus on the phenomenon.
"Slaves no more, but brothers and sisters" will be the theme for the Jan. 1, 2015, commemoration and for the message Pope Francis will write for the occasion, according to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.
-
A group of 11 sick, disabled and elderly Iraqi Christians—including an 80-year-old woman with breast cancer—defied terrorists who ordered them to convert to Islam or be beheaded, saying they preferred death to giving up their faith.
The united resistance prompted the Islamic State extremists to drop their demands and order the Christians to immediately leave their village of Karamless after first robbing them of their possessions, according to one of the survivors.
-
Residents of Ferguson "are struggling to find peace in the chaos" that has followed the shooting death of an unarmed teen by a police officer and "as people of Christ, we are struggling to find direction in the unrest," said Archbishop Robert J. Carlson of St. Louis.
"We are all aware of the turmoil and tragedy our St. Louis community is experiencing," he said in an Aug. 18 letter to Catholics of the archdiocese.